The Free Press honors Earth Day 2015 by saluting a local group with the goal to promote clean, sustainable energy. The Clintonville Energy Cooperative (CEC) currently takes on projects to make people’s homes more energy efficient using solar technology.
  Their mission is to build resilience and sustainability in the Clintonville area “by increasing household energy efficiency and increasing the number of households using affordable, renewable energy options.” Their methods are financially efficient as well, using a “time bank – where people provide their skills and gifts to bank hours of service and draw on these banked hours to receive the services they need.”
  The CEC is committed to “a cooperative environment” that “occurs when the users are the same people who produce the services. This ensures meaningful economic value through more widespread accessibility to resources. Social capital is the binding inner value created within a community, from sharing our resources such as time and effort. We believe that we are optimizing these values.”
  The CEC works toward:

Columbus elector Jonathan C. Beard today filed an elections Complaint seeking to end false campaign statements  being made by Columbus mayoral candidate Andrew Ginther and his surrogates.  My Complaint, filed with the Ohio Elections Commissions, alleges multiple violations of ORC 3517.21, which bars false statements to promote or oppose candidates in elections for public office.  I believe the state of Ohio has a compelling interest in enforcing honest political debate, and have asked for that result.

I attended the Stonewall Democrats of Central Ohio (SDCO) meeting on April 7th in support of Columbus City Council candidate Will Petrik. I learned that the SDCO had recommended Petrik to be endorsed for Columbus City Council. I was impressed with this bold move. I had only been to one of their meetings before about 10 years ago or so. I remember leaving that meeting on my own as I was definitely one of the few People of Color in the room and there were very few women in attendance. I felt like an outsider. This time, I was excited about attending and anticipated some real progress with this organization.
  This excitement started to fade quickly as I walked into the small pack of mostly white (still) attendees and likely coming from the same social and economic demographic. Most people were friendly but many, including candidates, didn't even say hello. In my culture as I know it, a "saludo" (greeting/hello) is a must regardless of anything. There seemed to be many Andrew Ginther for Mayor supporters in attendance and it felt as though I was at a Ginther rally or meeting. It was obvious they had stacked the room, which is fair play in politics I suppose.

Once upon a time if you were stopped by the police, and for whatever reason, found yourself being the victim of police brutality, even with witnesses, you would lose in a court of law based on the “word” of the police officer(s) involved.
  If the police officer, after he shot a “suspect,” called in to the station to report “Man down, man shot, he took my Taser,” it would be assumed by the dispatcher that the officer needed back-up and shot the “suspect,” eight times, in self-defense. The news and media reports would tell the public that the “suspect” died as a result of the police officer using “necessary force” to protect himself. Although many of us who heard the police explanation and the news reports didn’t believe we were getting the truth, there wasn’t much we could do or say about it and eventually, like all of the other times, the story would fade away.

What if Columbus was a Zero Waste City by 2040? Sound impossible? Interestingly enough, a city with about 30,000 more people aims to reach that goal by 2020. San Francisco has a landfill diversion rate of over 80 percent. A “green team” is employed to ensure residents and businesses help clean up their city and a massive composting program was created to reuse food waste that then is used as fertilizer. Green jobs and nutritious food would be a win-win arrangement to make Columbus more green.
  To some, a single object that best symbolizes towering landfills could be the notorious styrofoam take-out container, but the greatest image for throw-away culture today is the pitiful, plastic grocery bag. Columbus is considering measures to place a surcharge on such bags or to even, potentially, ban them. If the capital city adopts such initiatives, we will consciously decide to further care for our neighborhoods and natural landscape and to move towards zero waste.

Stagnate to Striding